# Replication Materials for "The Power of Place: Rural Descriptive Representation and Policy Support"

Lukas K. Alexander, Dihan Shi | Washington University in St. Louis

This archive contains all code and data necessary to reproduce the results in "The Power of Place: Rural Descriptive Representation and Policy Support".

Please direct all questions regarding replication to Dihan Shi (<dihan@wustl.edu>).

## Reproduction Environment

The code was last run by the authors using the following environment:

- Windows 11 PC with 128 GB RAM and Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU @ 2.20GHz
  - R 4.5.2 UCRT
  - RStudio 2026.01.1 Build 403

The run time for the entire replication is approximately 1 hour on this setup.

The hardware setup is not necessary to reproduce the results, although it may affect the execution time, particularly for the post hoc power analysis (Table C1).

Additionally, `\packages\package_versions.txt` records the version numbers of R packages used by the authors, all of which are available on CRAN.

## Data Files

The data used in this research is provided in the `\data` directory:

- `data\survey.xlsx`: Survey data of 502 rural American participants collected by the authors. The survey experiment was fielded January 23-25, 2026 on CloudResearch Connect.
- `data\RUCA-codes-2020-zipcode.csv`: Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes for U.S. zip codes, obtained from the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) website: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-commuting-area-codes/documentation/.

## Instructions for Reproducing Results

To reproduce the results presented in the manuscript and appendices, simply run all code chunks or knit `replication.Rmd` in the root directory. All figures and tables will be saved in the `\results` directory.

If you would like to use the same R package versions we used (although likely not necessary), they are recorded in `\packages\package_versions.txt`. Run `\packages\install_packages.R` to install these versions of packages.
